Cucumber-nagios + Flapjack: Rethinking Monitoring for the Cloud

Writing checks for your monitoring system is boring. You end up writing the same checks again and again, and it can be difficult to verify behavior instead of availability. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a standard library of checks you could reuse across your infrastructure? it lets you write reusable behavioral tests in human-readable language.Say hello to cucumber-nagios – it lets you write reusable behavioral tests in human-readable language. As cucumber-nagios output the test results in the Nagios plugin format you can run your checks from any monitoring system that understands the format, but as you start adding more machines to your monitoring system you’re going to notice slowdowns and reliability problems. Enter Flapjack, a scalable and distributed monitoring system. It natively talks the Nagios plugin format, and can easily be scaled from 1 server to 1000. Flapjack aims to be simple to set up, configure, and maintain, and easily scales from a single host to multiple. This presentation will be covering how to get up and running with both cucumber-nagios + Flapjack, writing tests for your web apps, and why it’s important to test the behavior (and not just the availability) of your production web apps.